College professor dating student who is kathy griffin dating december 2016

For despite the handful of happy families that result from professor/grad student couplings, the practice has an overwhelmingly deleterious effect on the academic community.It’s not just a matter of two consenting adults’ hearts wanting what they want.There are a few factors in play that make the professor-student relationship different than any relationship college students have had before.

For college students, academic performance and romance are two of the most stressful elements of day-to-day life.

It's even more difficult when those things become intertwined.

Her professor’s behavior,” Fehr explains, has “put her in a position where she just couldn’t win.” .

Advisees of the very famous may, indeed, never leave the shadow of their parents’ influence.

Correspondingly, advisees of famous student-seducers—male or female, straight or LGBT, platonically relationshipped or otherwise—can easily be tainted for their entire careers.

“If a woman co-authors with a more senior man (and notice the heterosexism that we always assume heterosexual relationships),” explains Rachel Mc Kinnon, an assistant professor at the College of Charleston, “some people either explicitly or implicitly suspect that they’re in a romantic relationship, and that the senior scholar only offered to help her publish for romantic interests.

“It can encourage straight male faculty to favor supervising male students,” explains Eric Wiland, an associate professor of philosophy (and my husband’s colleague) at the University of Missouri–St. This, he explains, is “to avoid problems, rumors, and other foul-ups, sometimes self-inflicted.” He gives the dispiriting example of a female grad student he knows at another school, who now gets “ professional attention, because the male faculty in her department are now scared to socialize with her in the way they socialize with their male students, and in the way they used to socialize with her.” And most upsettingly, Wiland says, “this even extends to semi-social things, like informal workshops and lab meetings.” So what, if anything, can be done?

Institutional policies that forbid such relationships? Many universities have these already, and they rarely seem to matter.

Plus, college-level instructors are often authoritative and knowledgeable in their field, which can help a harmless sense of attraction develop into a full-blown crush.

And professors often aren't unaware of their younger students' charms, either.

Another factor is that many colleges foster a culture of closeness between professors and students, with everyone operating on a first-name basis and in a relatively informal social structure.